CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE #2
“And it should be you.”
“Apparently.”
There it was again. That stubborn, infuriating tilt of her chin.
The fire caught the line of her throat, and I was very aware of how close I was standing and how long I’d been managing this: managing the want of her, managing the dragon’s constant, insistent pull toward her, managing the image that had lived behind my eyes since Lance had confessed.
An image of the two of them, his cock inside her, his lips on the line of her neck, her moaning.
I was done managing.
“Take off your shift,” I said.
The silence in the room was absolute.
Her eyes narrowed. “No.”
“You’ve known what this was moving toward: that the two of us is inevitable. I’ve always known it—”
“—I said no.”
I chuckled because I couldn’t help it. “Are you going to pretend you don’t want me?” The words came out harder than I intended. “You’ve wanted this just as much as I have. Don’t stand there and pretend you don’t when I’ve finally decided to give you what you’ve wanted all along.”
“Wanting something and choosing it are two different things.” Her voice didn’t shake. I almost wished it would. “And I’m not choosing this or you. Not tonight.”
“Why not tonight?”
“Because tonight you’re not the man I’ve been—” She stopped, pressed her lips together, and started again. “Tonight you’re exactly what I always thought you were.”
“And what is that?”
“A tyrant.” She said the word simply, and she didn’t mean it as an insult, but as a diagnosis. “You’re punishing Lance because you’re angry at the situation.”
“No. I’m angry with him because he wronged me.”
“You think he wronged you, but you had nothing to do with what happened between him and me. You’re like a spoiled little child who didn’t get his way, and now—”
I stepped closer, but she held her ground. Regardless, I could see the pulse in her throat.
“You will take off your clothing, then you will get on the bed, and you will spread your fucking legs,” I said. “Now.”
Something moved across her face.
“No.”
“I won’t tell you again.”
She glared at me. “You don’t command me to do anything.”
“I’m your fucking king, so whatever I tell you is your law.”
“You are nothing and no one to me.”
I took the small step that separated us and reached out to grip the line of her linen shift. I watched as her breath caught, and then I pulled. The linen tore clean down the middle.
One pull. That was all it took.
She didn’t scream, and she didn’t flinch back. She just stood there, breathing, with the ruined fabric falling away from her body and her eyes locked on my face like she was daring me to look down.
I looked down.
Her breasts were round and full, her nipples hardening the instant the cool air touched them. I watched the slow tightening, the flush of color at the tips. I reached out and brushed my thumb across one. She made no sound, but her breath changed.
I did it again, but this time slower.
“You can tell me whatever you want,” I said on a chuckle. “You can stand there and call me a tyrant and all the rest of it.” I brushed the pad of my thumb across her nipple once more and watched it peak harder. “But your body tells me something else entirely… just as it always has.”
Her jaw was tight, and her eyes were furious, but her nipples were hard enough to cut glass.
I took her hand and noticed that she didn’t pull away.
She also didn’t fight me as I drew her hand forward and pressed her palm flat against the swell of my cock, which was straining against the fabric of my braies.
I heard her breath catch, and I felt her fingers go still against the weight and heat of me.
Her eyes dropped. Just briefly. Then they came back up again.
“There,” I said.
Her mouth pressed into a line, but she didn’t speak.
“Now.” I kept her hand where it was, kept my thumb moving in small, deliberate circles against her breast. “You will tell me where Lance touched you.”
Nothing.
“You will tell me how he fucked you, whether he was rough or kind.” I reached down to palm her cunt over the fabric that separated me from her. She was warm between her thighs. I leaned down to whisper in her ear. “I am rough.”
I felt her hand close more tightly over my cock, and her breathing hitched. Even so, she looked at a point past my shoulder and set her jaw.
“Tell me how many times he fucked you.”
She still refused to respond. All she would give me was just that infuriating stillness, that refusal to give me anything, not even the satisfaction of watching her break. Her fingers were warm against me, but they were unmoving, and that stillness was somehow worse than if she’d fought.
I moved my hand over the hem of her waistline, down the line of her stomach, and between her thighs. The I brought my fingers to the lips of her cunt. Once I felt the obvious wetness there, I smiled. “You’re soaking for me.”
“My body works against my mind,” she said, the words sounding angry as her free hand fisted at her side.
I slipped a finger inside her. “Mmm. This is mine, just as you are mine.”
“You might manipulate my body to give you the reaction you want, but you will never manipulate my mind. Nor will you ever own any part of me.”
She breathed in deeply. “And what you are doing to me now, after everything I’ve said to you, is no better than what Galahad attempted to do to me.”
She paused, breathed in deeply. “You are no better than Galahad.”
The room went very still. The fire snapped once, and the sound was almost obscene in the quiet.
My fingers paused of their own accord, and soon I pulled them out of her. Even though her slick was covering them, I could recognize the truth in her words. I had never owned any part of her, and I could recognize that I never would.
Even so, I was harder than I could ever remember being. Every pulse of blood felt like pressure on the edge of something breaking.
I didn’t move. I was standing close enough to feel the warmth off her skin, and I didn’t move because I couldn’t. The words had gone into me like cold water. Like a blade finding the exact right seam in armor.
No better than Galahad.
I heard the words again. And again. And I saw, unwillingly, almost helplessly, the bruises Lance had reacted to in the training yard. I remembered the way she’d flinched that first morning when someone moved too fast behind her.
I took a step back. Then another after that.
She watched me do it, and her expression didn’t soften. She wasn’t offering me absolution. She was just watching, the way she always watched, like she was making an internal list of what she found.
My jaw was tight. My hands were loose at my sides only because I’d made them that way.
“Get out,” I said.
“Arthur—”
“Get. Out.”
And so she left. And the sound of the door closing behind her was the loudest sound I could ever remember hearing. Once she was gone, I stood in the middle of my chambers for a long time. I stood there even after the fire had burned down to coals and the room had gone cold.
-GALAHAD-
I knelt at the altar for a long time before the others arrived.
The candles were lit, all of them, every iron stand full and burning.
The light moved against the walls in long, slow waves.
Above the altar, the Boundless gazed down from carved marble: their eyes were serene, open-handed, eyes without pupils.
I had been called a coward once, but by a man who had never seen true evil up close. I had seen true evil, and now I was determined to rise up against it, against her.
The door opened behind me, followed by the sounds of three sets of footsteps, measured and quiet.
They knew better than to speak first or to interrupt me in my prayers.
Instead, they moved as silently as they could and knelt beside me.
I finished my prayer, pressed my palms flat against my thighs, and rose.
Bonney was the tallest of them. Truly, he was built like a barn door, with a broad, honest face and the kind of eyes that still held surprise in them, even now.
He’d been in the King’s Guard for six years.
He had a wife in the lower city and a son who was learning to walk.
Bonney was not a cruel man, and that mattered.
Lionel stood beside him: shorter, darker, and balder, with his jaw set and his arms crossed over his chest. I had noticed that he crossed them when he was afraid; I had observed that in him over many weeks of watching and deciding whether he was strong enough to stand beside me. I believed he was.
Calogrenant hung back near the door. He was the youngest of the three, twenty years old, perhaps.
The night her magic had overcome me had hit him the hardest, for he had been the one standing closest to the corridor when the stones cracked and the ice overtook them.
His hands still trembled sometimes when he thought no one was watching.
I watched everything.
“Kneel,” I said.
They knelt.
I moved to stand before them, my back to the altar. The candlelight too was behind me. I did not arrange it that way deliberately: sometimes these things simply happened when the Boundless were present in a space.
“You saw what the witch did,” I said.
No one spoke, and that was answer enough.
“The corridor. The stones. The water climbing the walls against gravity and freezing in place.”
I let a pause settle. “These are not the works of a frightened woman. They are also not the reflexive outburst of untrained power. What we witnessed was revelation; her mask slipped. It was a rare window into the demon inside her because it showed its face,
and it showed its face because it felt safe enough to do so.”
I looked at each of them in turn. “Ask yourself why it felt safe.”
Bonney’s throat moved.
“The king,” Lionel said quietly.
“The king,” I agreed. “The king protects her and by protecting her, he protects the demon. And now it is up to us to protect the king and, in so doing, to protect the people of Logres against an evil that would see them all dead.” I paused. “An evil that would see all of us dead.”
I walked to the side table where I had left the Purging Texts.
The binding was cracked from years of handling, not mine alone, of course.
These passages had been read by generations of the faithful.